You know that a foreign vegetable has been completely accepted into Indian cuisine when it undergoes chutneyfication. By this metric, the tomato has become a quintessential Indian vegetable since the Portuguese brought it over in the 16th century. The number of recipes for tomato chutney is immense...
This word became the ancestor of a number of words used all over India: Hindi: baingan Kannada: badne kai (‘kai’ = vegetable) Telugu: vankaya Bengali: begun Marathi: vangi Sindhi: vangan Interesting. I love eggplant, but I’ve never thought of it as a substitute for Gas-X. Perhaps...